Joann Harrah
Biography
From http://blogs.myspace.com/joannharrah
"The fluidity of stories and personal biography are what interest me. Threads of family history and traditional imagery are often compounded in my work, subverting one another to find an inventive way to describe personal biography. While the work remains charming and sincere, the subversion often leads to something surprisingly discerning or even dubious.
"Without the mind's collected stories of the past, one would be living in a void. It is this collected information that constantly informs us and who we are at any given moment. The waxing and waning of this information, or stories, is the mind's relationship with behavior and thought. As well as provides continuity to the perceived life for the individual.
"Yet more specifically it is the mind's collective memory of family history that influences my work. I'm engaged in finding ever more inventive ways to chronicle this idea of lineage. These often overlapping narratives of family are fluid, sinuous and poetic in nature. And they are always informed by a larger culture or tradition. I use my own family, and my immediate access to them for information, as the primary resource for my art. This information is often verbal, written, or remembered, or comes in the form of collected vernacular photography. As a means of visual storytelling, this information then goes through various processes of fabrication and structure. Until I have a piece where the information, or stories, have formed their own visual habitat."
Joann Harrah earned her MFA in Mixed Media, with a Photography Minor, from Queens College and BFA in Painting from The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH. She has shown at ABC No Rio, New York City, among others.
